Wikipedia:Peer review/Owen Gingerich/archive1

Owen Gingerich

I think a little bit more information on his early life and career would be desirable, but I have been unable to locate further details. The article is well-referenced and, I think, gives a good, NPOV view of his contributions and notability. I've gotten to the end of what I can do on my own with this article, please let me know what areas for improvement you can identify. Please let me know if you think the article is a candidate for Good Article status. Jacob1207 20:08, 15 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Please see automated peer review suggestions here. Thanks, AZ _t 23:20, 15 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Some quick comments:

The lead should be at least two paragraphs. My preference (its not a guideline) is for the lead not to contain references, but to expand those ideas in the later parts of the article and reference them there. Sometimes that doesn't work well though.

I have slightly expanded the intro and broken it into two paragraphs in what seems a logical manner. I agree with the general principle that citations in the opening are not ideal, but seems like the least bad option here. (1) the statements are worth inclusion in the article; (2) once included, the statements should be cited; (3) I don't see any better place to put the statements in the present article; and (4) there's not much more that could be said on the two statements that would make them worth their own paragraph in the article. But, if there's any better way to do it, let's do that. What do you think of the intro section now? Jacob1207 20:22, 16 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Check the capitalization of the section headers. Only the first word should be capitalized, with the excpetion of proper nouns. See MoS:HEAD. "On Intellegent Design" should probably drop the "On", and given the information that follows could just as well be "Intellegent design".

Done. Jacob1207 20:22, 16 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Should the "Owen" in "Early life" should be changed to "Gingerich"? Or perhaps then it isn't clear who started college.

I think you're right, the usage did seem sorta odd and non-encyclopedic. Please take a look at the current wording and let me know if it fixes that while still being clear and concise. Jacob1207 20:22, 16 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

The first sentence in the Careers... section, "This led him to ...", doesn't flow well for the first phrase of a section. "This" being what former thought?

Yeah, that was a holdover from an early version of the article. I wish there was more stuff on his University days and early career, which would be the best transition. In the meantime, I have modified that language to avoid the problem you point out. Jacob1207 20:22, 16 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

The "On Intellegent Design" section is interesting but strikes me as overly long when compared to the whole article. But get some other opinions before considering any trimming there.

There is something wrong in this phrase "concluding that M91 was probably a cometthat M102 was probably a duplication of M101." It might be helpful to paste the whole article into a word processor to see what the spell checker finds.

Fixed, I think. Jacob1207 20:22, 16 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Year linking is inconsistent. My preference would be to delink all years, except when a full date is given.

Done. Jacob1207 20:22, 16 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

"References" should be a full level two section before the External link. External links always come last. See WP:LAYOUT. There seem to be a lot of external links, but nothing objectionable.

The References section has been modified accordingly. I removed one broken external link, but I think the remaining ones are all valuable and well worth inclusion. Jacob1207 20:22, 16 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

More work could be done to link other articles to this one. Google reveals these potential articles.

Excellent suggestion. I've linked two more articles to this one, I'll take a look at all of those suggestions as well. Thanks for the help! And let me know what you think of the modifications and anything else that you notice. Jacob1207 20:22, 16 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Looks good. I de-capped another header and linked a year associated with a complete date. One final suggestion is to look at the instances of "also" in the article. The word can almost always be dropped from a sentence without losing clarity. JonHarder 03:40, 17 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah, I missed those. Thanks. I've also removed two superfluous instances of the word "also" from the article and your point regarding its overuse is a valuable one (I'll be on the lookout for that in my own editing henceforth).

The article is well-written, overall. I've just skimmed through it, so a more thorough review would be helpful too. JonHarder 04:29, 16 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks a lot for your assistance, Jon. The article is significantly better for having been peer reviewed. I think that it is Good Article material, so I'm gonna put it up for that. Hopefully it'll turn up more improvements. Jacob1207 07:24, 20 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]